longer present in the same force, or was it that | one upon the other, and looking at her with the sense of his being divided from her in her quiet expectation. feeling about her godfather roused the slumbering sources of alienation, and marred her own vision? Perhaps both causes were at work. Our relations with our fellow-men are most often determined by coincident currents of that sort; the inexcusable word or deed seldom comes until after affection or reverence has been already enfeebled by the strain of repeated excuses. It was true that Savonarola's glance at Romola had some of that hardness which is caused by an egoistic prepossession. He divined that the interview she had sought was to turn on the fate of the conspirators, a subject on which he had already had to quell inner voices that might be, come loud again when encouraged from without. Seated in his cell, correcting the sheets of his Triumph of the Cross, it was easier to repose on a resolution of neutrality. "It is a question of moment, doubtless, on which you wished to see me, my daughter," he began, in a tone which was gentle rather from self-control than from immediate inclination, "I know you are not wont to lay stress on small matters." "Father, you know what it is before I tell you," said Romola, forgetting every thing else as soon as she began to pour forth her plea. "You know what I am caring for-it is for the life of the old man I love best in the world. The thought of him has gone together with the thought of my father as long as I remember the daylight. That is my warrant for coming to you, even if my coming should have been needless. Perhaps it is: perhaps you have already determined that your power over the hearts of men shall be used to prevent them from denying to Florentines a right which you yourself helped to earn for them." "I was going to say, father, that this matter is surely of higher moment than many about which I have heard you preach and exhort fervidly. If it belonged to you to urge that men condemned for offenses against the State should have the right to appeal to the Great Councilif-" Romola was getting eager again—"if you count it a glory to have won that right for them, can it less belong to you to declare yourself against the right being denied to almost the first men who need it? Surely that touches the Christian life more closely than whether you knew beforehand that the Dauphin would die, or whether Pisa will be conquered.” There was a subtle movement, like a subdued sign of pain, in Savonarola's strong lips, before he began to speak. "My daughter, I speak as it is given me to speak-I am not master of the times when I may become the vehicle of knowledge beyond the common lights of men. In this case I have no illumination beyond what wisdom may give to those who are charged with the safety of the State. As to the law of Appeal against the Six Votes, I labored to have it passed in order that no Florentine should be subject to loss of life and goods through the private hatred of a few who might happen to be in power; but these five men, who have desired to overthrow a free government and restore a corrupt tyrant, have been condemned with the assent of a large assembly of their fellow-citizens. They refused at first to have their cause brought before the Great Council. They have lost the right to the appeal." "How can they have lost it?" said Romola. "It is the right to appeal against condemnation, and they have never been condemned till now; and, forgive me, father, it is private hatred that would deny them the appeal; it is the violence of the few that frightens others; else why was the assembly divided again directly, after it had seemed to agree? And if any thing weighs against the observance of the law, let this weigh for it—this, that you used to preach more earnestly than all else, that there should be no place given to hatred and bloodshed because of these "I meddle not with the functions of the State, my daughter," said Fra Girolamo, strongly disinclined to reopen externally a debate which he had already gone through inwardly. "I have preached and labored that Florence should have a good government, for a good government is needful to the perfecting of the Christian life; but I keep away my hands from particular affairs, which it is the office of experienced citi-party strifes, so that private ill-will should not zens to administer." "Surely, father-" Romola broke off. She had uttered this first word almost impetuously, but she was checked by the counter agitation of feeling herself in an attitude of remonstrance toward the man who had been the source of guidance and strength to her. In the act of rebelling she was bruising her own reverence. Savonarola was too keen not to divine something of the conflict that was arresting her-too noble deliberately to assume in calm speech that self-justifying evasiveness into which he was often hurried in public by the crowding impulses of the orator. "Say what is in your heart; speak on, my daughter," he said, standing with his arms laid find its opportunities in public acts. Father, you know that there is private hatred concerned here: will it not dishonor you not to have interposed on the side of mercy, when there are many who hold that it is also the side of law and justice ?" "My daughter," said Fra Girolamo, with more visible emotion than before, "there is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good. The safety of Florence, which means even more than the welfare of Florentines, now demands severity, as it once demanded mercy. It is not only for a past plot that these men are condemned, but also for a plot which has not yet been executed; and the devices that were leading to its execution are not put an end to: the tyrant is still gathering | satisfy those reverential memories. his forces in Romagna; and the enemies of Florence, that sit in the highest places of Italy, are ready to hurl any stone that will crush her." "What plot?" said Romola, reddening, and trembling with alarmed surprise. With a sudden movement toward him, she said: "Forgive me, father; it is pain to me to have spoken those words—yet I can not help speaking. I am little and feeble compared with you; you brought me light and strength. But "You carry papers in your hand, I see," said I submitted because I felt the proffered strength Fra Girolamo, pointing to the hand-bills. "One-because I saw the light. Now I can not see of them will, perhaps, tell you that the govern-it. ment has had new information." Father, you yourself declare that there comes a moment when the soul must have no guide but the voice within it to tell whether the consecrated thing has sacred virtue. And therefore I must speak." Romola hastily opened the hand-bill she had not yet read, and saw that the government had now positive evidence of a second plot, which was to have been carried out in this August Savonarola had that readily roused resenttime. To her mind it was like reading a con- ment toward opposition, hardly separable from firmation that Tito had won his safety by foul a power-loving and powerful nature, accustommeans; his pretense of wishing that the Frate ed to seek great ends that cast a reflected grandshould exert himself on behalf of the condemned eur on the means by which they are sought. only helped the wretched conviction. She crush- His sermons have much of that red flame in ed up the paper in her band, and, turning to them. And if he had been a meaner man his Savonarola, she said, with new passion, "Fa- susceptibility might have shown itself in irritather, what safety can there be for Florence tion at Romola's accusatory freedom, which was when the worst man can always escape? And," in strong contrast with the deference he habitshe went on, a sudden flash of remembrance ually received from his disciples. But at this coming from the thought about her husband, moment such feelings were nullified by that "have not you yourself encouraged this decep- hard struggle which made half the tragedy of tion, which corrupts the life of Florence, by want- his life-the struggle of a mind possessed by a ing more favor to be shown to Lorenzo Torna- never-silent hunger after purity and simplicity, buoni, who has worn two faces, and flattered yet caught in a tangle of egoistic demands, false you with a show of affection, when my godfa- ideas, and difficult outward conditions that made ther has always been honest? Ask all Florence simplicity impossible. Keenly alive to all the who of those five men has the truest heart, and suggestions of Romola's remonstrating words, there will not be many who will name any other he was rapidly surveying, as he had done bename than Bernardo del Nero. You did inter-fore, the courses of action that were open to pose with Francesco Valori for the sake of one prisoner: you have not then been neutral; and you know that your word will be powerful." "I do not desire the death of Bernardo," said Savonarola, coloring deeply. "It would be enough if he were sent out of the city." "Then why do you not speak to save an old man of seventy-five from dying a death of ignominy-to give him at least the fair chances of the law?" burst out Romola, the impetuosity of her nature so roused that she forgot every thing but her indignation. "It is not that you feel bound to be neutral; else why did you speak for Lorenzo Tornabuoni ? You spoke for him because he is more friendly to San Marco; my godfather feigns no friendship. It is not then as a Medicean that my godfather is to die; it is as a man you have no love for!" When Romola paused, with cheeks glowing, and with quivering lips, there was dead silence. As she saw Fra Girolamo standing motionless before her she seemed to herself to be hearing her own words over again; words that seemed in this echo of consciousness to be in strange, painful dissonance with the memories that made part of his presence to her. The moments of silence were expanded by gathering. compunction and self-doubt. She had committed sacrilege in her passion. And even the sense that she could retract nothing of her plea, that her mind could not submit itself to Savonarola's negative, made it the more needful to her to But it was a him, and their probable results. "You have full pardon for your frankness, my daughter. You speak, I know, out of the fullness of your family affections. But these affections must give way to the needs of the republic. If those men, who have a close acquaintance with the affairs of the State, believe, as I understand they do, that the public safety requires the extreme punishment of the law to fall on those five conspirators, I can not control their opinion, seeing that I stand aloof from such affairs." "Then you desire that they should die? You desire that the Appeal should be denied them ?" said Romola, feeling anew repelled by a vindication which seemed to her to have the nature of a subterfuge "I have said that I do not desire their death." "Then," said Romola, her indignation rising again, "you can be indifferent that Florentines should inflict death which you do not desire, when you might have protested against it—when you might have helped to hinder it, by urging the observance of a law which you held it good to get passed. Father, you used not to stand aloof: you used not to shrink from protesting. Do not say you can not protest where the lives of men are concerned; say, rather, you desire | nance. "God's kingdom is something widerelse, let me stand outside it with the beings that I love." their death. Florence that more hatred. Say, rather, you hold it good for there shall be more blood and Will the death of five Mediceans put an end to parties in Florence? Will the death of a noble old man like Bernardo del Nero save a city that holds such men as Dolfo Spini?" "My daughter, it is enough. The cause of freedom, which is the cause of God's kingdom upon earth, is often most injured by the enemies who carry within them the power of certain human virtues. The wickedest man is often not the most insurmountable obstacle to the triumph of good.' "Then why do you say again that you do not desire my godfather's death?" said Romola, in mingled anger and despair. "Rather you hold it the more needful he should die because he is the better man. I can not unravel your thoughts, father; I can not hear the real voice of your judgment and conscience." There was a moment's pause. Then Savonarola said, with keener emotion than he had yet shown, ed against the furthering of God's kingdom upon earth, the end for which I live and am willing myself to die." The two faces were lit up, each with an opposite emotion, each with an opposite certitude. Further words were impossible. Romola hastily covered her head and went out in silence. toll of a bell. CHAPTER LX. THE SCAFFOLD. THREE days later the moon that was just surmounting the buildings of the piazza in front of the Old Palace within the hour of midnight did not make the usual broad lights and shadows on the pavement. Not a hand's-breadth of pavement was to be seen, but only the heads of an eager, struggling multitude. And instead of that back-ground of silence in which the pattering footsteps and buzzing voices, the lute-thrumming or rapid scampering of the many nightwanderers of Florence stood out in obtrusive "Be thankful, my daughter, if your own soul distinctness, there was the back-ground of a roar has been spared perplexity, and judge not those from mingled shouts and imprecations, trampto whom a harder lot has been given. You see lings and pushings, and accidental clashing of one ground of action in this matter. I see weapons, across which nothing was distinguishmany. I have to choose that which will fur-able but a darting shriek or the heavy dropping ther the work intrusted to me. The end I seek is one to which minor respects must be sacri- Almost all who could call themselves the ficed. The death of five men-were they less public of Florence were awake at that hour, guilty than these is a light matter weighed and either inclosed within the limits of that against the withstanding of the vicious tyran- piazza, or struggling to enter it. Within the nies which stifle the life of Italy, and foster the palace were still assembled in the council-chamcorruption of the Church; a light matter weigh-ber all the chief magistracies, the eighty members of the senate, and the other select citizens who had been in hot debate through long hours of daylight and torchlight whether the Appeal should be granted or whether the sentence of death should be executed on the prisoners forthwith to forestall the dangerous chances of delay. And the debate had been so much like fierce quarrel that the noise from the council-chamber had reached the crowd outside. Only within the last hour had the question been decided: the Signoria had remained divided, four of them standing out resolutely for the Appeal, in spite of the strong argument that if they did not give way their houses should be sacked, until Francesco Valori, in brief and furious speech, made the determination of his party more ominously distinct by declaring that if the Signoria would not defend the liberties of the Florentine people by executing those five perfidious citizens, there would not be wanting others who would take that cause in hand to the peril of all who opposed it. The Florentine Cato triumphed. When the votes were counted again, the four obstinate white beans no longer appeared; the whole nine were of the fatal affirmative black, deciding the death of the five prisoners without delay-deciding also, only tacitly and with much more delay, the death of Francesco Valori. Under any other circumstances, Romola would have been sensitive to the appeal at the beginning of Savonarola's speech; but at this moment she was so utterly in antagonism with him, that what he called perplexity seemed to her sophistry and doubleness; and as he went on, his words only fed that flame of indignation which now again, more fully than ever before, lit up the memory of all his mistakes, and made her trust in him seem to have been a purblind delusion. She spoke almost with bitterness. "Do you then know so well what will further the coming of God's kingdom, father, that you will dare to despise the plea of mercy—of justice of faithfulness to your own teaching? Has the French king then brought renovation to Italy? Take care, father, lest your enemies have some reason when they say that, in your visions of what will further God's kingdom, you see only what will strengthen your own party." "And that is true!" said Savonarola, with flashing eyes. Romola's voice had seemed to him in that moment the voice of his enemies. "The cause of my party is the cause of God's kingdom." "I do not believe it!" said Romola, her whole frame shaken with passionate repug And now, while the judicial Eight were gone to the Bargello to prepare for the execution, the five condemned men were being led barefoot and It While this scene was passing up stairs Romola stood below against one of the massive pillars in the court of the palace, expecting the moment when her godfather would appear on his way to execution. By the use of strong interest she had gained permission to visit him in the evening of this day, and remain with him until the result of the council should be determined. And now she was waiting with his confessor to follow the guard that would lead him to the Bargello. Her heart was bent on clinging to the presence of the childless old man to the last moment, as her father would have done, and she had overpowered all remonstrances. Giovan Battista Ridolfi, a disciple of Savonarola, who was going in bitterness to behold the death of his elder brother Niccolò, had promised that she should be guarded, and now stood by her side. | "That is true," said Niccolò Macchiavelli; "but where personal ties are strong, the hostilities they raise must be taken due account of. Many of these half-way severities are mere hotheaded blundering. The only safe blows to be inflicted on men and parties are the blows that are too heavy to be avenged." "Niccolò," said Cennini, "there is a clever wickedness in thy talk sometimes that makes me mistrust thy pleasant young face as if it were a mask of Satan." "Not at all, my good Domenico," said Macchiavelli, smiling, and laying his hand on the elder's shoulder. "Satan was a blunderer, an introducer of novità, who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshiping him, and his portrait would have been more flattered." "Well, well," said Cennini, "I say not thy doctrine is not too clever for Satan: I only say it is wicked enough for him." "I tell you," said Macchiavelli, "my doctrine is the doctrine of all men who seek an end a little farther off than their own noses. Ask our Frate, our prophet, how his universal renovation is to be brought about: he will tell you, first, by getting a free and pure government; and since it appears that can not be done by making all Florentines love each other, it must be done by cutting off every head that happens to be obstinately in the way. Only if a man incurs odium by sanctioning a severity that is not thorough enough to be final, he commits a blunTito, too, was in the palace; but Romola had der. And something like that blunder, I susnot seen him. Since the evening of the seven-pect, the Frate has committed. It was an octeenth they had avoided each other, and Tito only knew by inference from the report of the Frate's neutrality that her pleading had failed. He was now surrounded with official and other personages, both Florentine and foreign, who had been awaiting the issue of the long-protracted council, maintaining, except when he was directly addressed, the subdued air and grave silence of a man whom actual events are placing in a painful state of strife between public and private feeling. When an allusion was made to his wife in relation to those events, he implied that, owing to the violent excitement of her mind, the mere fact of his continuing to hold office under a government concerned in her godfather's condemnation roused in her a diseased hostility toward him; so that for her sake he felt it best not to approach her. "Ah, the old Bardi blood!" said Cennini, with a shrug. "I shall not be surprised if this business shakes her loose from the Frate, as well as some others I could name. "It is excusable in a woman, who is doubtless beautiful, since she is the wife of Messer Tito," said a young French envoy, smiling and bowing to Tito, "to think that her affections must overrule the good of the State, and that nobody is to be beheaded who is any body's cousin; but such a view is not to be encouraged in the male population. It seems to me your Florentine polity is much weakened by it." casion on which he might have won some lustre by exerting himself to maintain the Appeal; instead of that, he has lost lustre, and has gained no strength.' Before any one else could speak, there came the expected announcement that the prisoners were about to leave the council chamber; and the majority of those who were present hurried toward the door, intent on securing the freest passage to the Bargello in the rear of the prisoners' guard; for the scene of the execution was one that drew alike those who were moved by the deepest passions and those who were moved by the coldest curiosity. Tito was one of those who remained behind. He had a native repugnance to sights of death and pain, and five days ago, whenever he had thought of this execution as a possibility, he had hoped that it would not take place, and that the utmost sentence would be exile: his own safety demanded no more. But now he felt that it would be a welcome guarantee of his security when he had learned that Bernardo del Nero's head was off the shoulders. The new knowledge and new attitude toward him disclosed by Romola on the day of his return, had given him a new dread of the power she possessed to make his position insecure. If any act of hers only succeeded in making him an object of suspicion and odium, he foresaw not only frustration, but frustration under unpleasant circumstances. Her irons, lifted them toward the golden head that was bent toward him, and then, checking that movement, leaned to kiss her. She seized the fettered hands that were hung down again, and kissed them as if they had been sacred things. "My poor Romola," said Bernardo, in a low voice, "I have only to die, but thou hast to live and I shall not be there to help thee." "Yes," said Romola, hurriedly, "you will help me-always-because I shall remember you." belief in Baldassarre had clearly determined her | that struggle of an agitated throng, as the aged wavering feelings against further submission, man, forgetting that his hands were bound with and if her godfather lived she would win him to share her belief without much trouble. Romola seemed more than ever an unmanageable fact in his destiny. But if Bernardo del Nero were dead, the difficulties that would beset her in placing herself in opposition to her husband would probably be insurmountable to her shrinking pride. Therefore Tito had felt easier when he knew that the Eight had gone to the Bargello to order the instant erection of the scaffold. Four other men-his intimates and confederates -were to die, besides Bernardo del Nero. But a man's own safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands. Tito felt them to be grim: even in the pursuit of what was agree-determined to look till the moment when her able, this paradoxical life forced upon him the godfather laid his head on the block. Now while desire for what was disagreeable. But he had the prisoners were allowed a brief interval with had other experience of this sort, and as he heard their confessor, the spectators were pressing into through the open doorway the shuffle of many the court until the crowd became dense around feet and the clanking of metal on the stairs, he the black scaffold, and the torches fixed in iron was able to answer the questions of the young rings against the pillars threw a varying startling French envoy without showing signs of any oth-light at one moment on passionless stone carver feeling than that of sad resignation to State necessities. She was taken away and conducted up the flight of steps that led to the loggia surrounding the grand old court. She took her place there, ings, at another on some pale face agitated with suppressed rage or suppressed grief-the face of one among the many near relatives of the condemned, who were presently to receive their dead and carry them home. Romola's face looked like a marble image against the dark arch as she stood watching for the moment when her godfather would appear at the foot of the scaffold. He was to suffer first, and Battista Ridolfi, who was by her side, had promised to take her away through a door behind them when she should have seen the last look of the man who alone in all the world had shared her pitying love for her father. still, in the back-ground of her thought, there was the possibility striving to be a hope, that some rescue might yet come, something that would keep that scaffold unstained by blood. And Those sounds fell on Romola as if her power of hearing had been exalted along with every other sensibility of her nature. She needed no arm to support her; she shed no tears. She felt that intensity of life which seems to transcend both grief and joy—in which the mind seems to itself akin to elder forces that wrought out existence before the birth of pleasure and pain. Since her godfather's fate had been decided, the previous struggle of feeling in her had given way to an identification of herself with him in these supreme moments: she was inwardly asserting for him that, if he suffered the punishment of treason, he did not deserve the name of traitor; he was the victim to a collision between two kinds of faithfulness. It was not given to him to die for the noblest cause, and For a long while there was constant moveyet he died because of his nobleness. He might ment, lights flickering, heads swaying to and have been a meaner man, and found it easier fro, confused voices within the court, rushing not to incur this guilt. Romola was feeling the waves of sound through the entrance from withfull force of that sympathy with the individual out. It seemed to Romola as if she were in the lot that is continually opposing itself to the form- midst of a storm or a troubled sea, caring noulæ by which actions and parties are judged. thing about the storm, but only about holding She was treading the way with her second fa-out a signal till the eyes that looked for it could ther to the scaffold, and nerving herself to defy ignomy by the consciousness that it was not deserved. The way was fenced in by three hundred armed men, who had been placed as a guard by the orders of Francesco Valori, for among the apparent contradictions that belonged to this event, not the least striking was the alleged alarm on the one hand at the popular rage against the conspirators, and the alleged alarm on the other lest there should be an attempt to rescue them in the midst of a hostile crowd. When they had arrived within the court of the Bargello, Romola was allowed to approach Bernardo with his confessor for a moment of farewell. Many eyes were bent on them even in seek it no more. Suddenly there was stillness, and the very tapers seemed to tremble into quiet. The executioner was ready on the scaffold, and Bernardo del Nero was seen ascending it with a slow firm step. Romola made no visible movement, uttered not even a suppressed sound: she stood more firmly, caring for his firmness. She saw him pause, saw the white head kept erect, while he said, in a voice distinctly audible, "It is but a short space of life that my fellowcitizens have taken from me." She perceived that he was gazing slowly round him as he spoke. She felt that his eyes were resting on her, and that she was stretching out her arms toward him. Then she saw no more |